Better Regulation of Business Will Be Necessary as Population Explodes and Energy Prices Rise

Big corporations are like big sharks.  They’re not evil.  They’re just eating. I read this clever observation several years ago on CDBaby, and had the immediate realization that WE have to swim with those sharks, and our shark cage (government) just isn’t protecting us like it once did.  On this, the eve of release of Michael Moore’s new movie “Capitalism: A Love Story“, I just have to write about the impact of capitalism on our future, and how we might possibly avoid sliding into an almost feudal state where a tiny upper class of owners dominates a huge but painfully poor mass of wage slaves. 

The Future of Energy: Things Never Change So Much …

Things never change so much as they stay the same. That’s the saying, anyway, and I figure I’ll see how things balance out if I stick around long enough.  I expect that there will be surprises, and some advances people expect won’t happen, or will be disappointing, while other inventions will become mainstays of our civilization.  Inevitably, the deciding factor behind the decision to discard or keep something involves money, and I believe that will extend to our energy infrastructure.

Will the New U.S. Administration Make Sustainability a Theme?

The president-elect made hope and change key planks in his platform. Since past U.S. presidencies have failed to recognize sustainability as being of key importance to our future, let alone made it a consideration in the setting of policy, will this change in the new administration? There is certainly no single topic that is more important in the intermediate and long term pictures, and we need to be both planning and acting today to ensure the most comfortable glidepath possible through the coming period of population boom-and-bust as well as energy shortages and pollution problems. Does the new administration recognize our current and future issues, and will they take action to create and act on the kind of plans we will need to avoid major economic upheavals in the coming decades?

Civilizations Rise and Fall Due to “Global Warming”-like Problems

If We Must Fall, Can We Manage to Do It Gradually? Every civilization in history has fallen except the current one. That is simple truth, and we have no reason to think that we can carry on indefinitely as we have been. In fact, there are many indications that we are headed into a decline of our own: population exceeding the global capacity in more and more aspects, significant signs of negative impact on the ecology, the accelerating extinction of many species in our highly interdependent environment, overuse of important resources leading to exhaustion. All this brings up the important questions: Are we any smarter than our predecessors, and can we understand what is happening and work together effectively to control the decline and mitigate the suffering involved?

Growth Can’t Continue Forever, So What’s Next?

Perhaps our many wonderful scientific advancements and ever-more sophisticated civilization have blinded us to certain realities. We have enjoyed the benefits of cheap energy for the past few hundred years, first with coal and then with the addition of petroleum, and our population, scientific knowledge, and standards of living have expanded greatly. Eventually, however, the easiest to obtain of our fuel sources will begin to run out, and the cost of production will inevitably rise to the point where we won’t be able to afford to use it as we did before. We have become so accustomed to our situation that we take growth for granted, and it seems the entire business world takes it as a given that success and profitability are possible only through growth. Since growth can’t continue forever, what will replace it? Are we smart enough to avoid a precipitous decline and the pain that suggests, and find a new paradigm that permits more controllable change and is sustainable in the long term?

Will We Ever Know For Sure If Humans Are Causing Climate Change (and Does It Matter)?

I am overwhelmed with the data and analyses of global warming and climate change. A quick search on Google reveals over 74 million articles on global warming. While that is certainly overstated due to multiple “finds”, even if I could find the most authoritative 1000 of them, and spend as little as 5 minutes skimming each one, it would take me 83 hours, and I am lucky to have a few hours in the week for any activity like this. At this rate, in the 6 months or more it would take me to do that, there would be … how many more articles? I hate to guess, but I expect I would never catch up. I have learned what I think I know now from a diverse mix of news, scientific articles, the movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, and blogs like Anthony Watts’ “Watts Up With That?“. I am recognizing my limitations, however. Will we ever have a definitive answer as to whether and how much human activity is affecting the climate? And isn’t it more important that we retain the ability to respond to climate change, since nature will inevitably change the climate anyway, sooner or later?

Global Warming and Our Responsibility to the Future – A Call to Action

Global warming and climate change are only pieces of the puzzle. The storm of media coverage and conflicting scientific data around global warming is overwhelming, but it is concealing very real problems we need to face if we are to ensure ourselves and our descendants can continue anything like the kind of lifestyles we have today. Climate change will happen, whether we cause it or not, and when it does, how prepared will we be? Energy supplies are a key factor, not only for our current relative comfort but as an enabler to our ability to deal with issues we will face in the short and long term. Where does this all lead, and what are our responsibilities as individuals? What can we do to ensure a better future?

Price of Rice Reflects Overpopulation Problem

The scale of problems from overpopulation will increase as the population grows. The Christian Science Monitor, long a bastion of sound journalism that has never followed the corporate main stream media (one of few), ran an article recently (link) explaining how a lack of agricultural development in the Philippines is combining with their rapidly growing population (and that of other less-developed nations) to create food shortages. The clearest evidence of the shortages is in the doubling of rice prices in the past year (2007-2008). While most people in North America, for instance, won’t think that is a very big deal, there are hundreds of millions of people in other parts of the planet who depend on rice as a staple – a major part of their diet – and for whom any price increase is seriously bad news. I remember reading in the news a month or two ago that the price rise has caused people who used to get two bowls of rice per day to cut back to one. (Try living on that diet, you in the developed countries, if you want a dose of reality.) The important realization is that, as energy shortages and population growth exacerbate food shortages, there will be more food riots and unrest in the fastest growing and least-developed countries. In response, the developed countries need to put more family planning, education, and economic aid, all proven to reduce birthrates, into the poorest areas of the globe for the good of all. Here’s a more detailed analysis.

Lop-sided Focus on Climate Change Ignores Other Problems; Obscures the Root Problem: Overpopulation

Many feel the climate change risk is overstated and unsupported by evidence. Among websites that question whether global warming is supported by evidence, Anthony Watt’s Watt’s Up With That website is, in my opinion, probably the most credible, and its popularity continues to grow. His more than half million hits per month include enough commenters expressing significant weather knowledge and reasonable positions (among the Gore haters and anti-government types) to make it worth reading, in my opinion. It is clear that the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and a lot of press, some of the highest profile releases coming from James Hansen, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, has stirred a lot of concern worldwide. Personally, I am more concerned with the many problems, climate change possibly included, caused by the huge increase in the global human population over the last century.

Calls for Offshore Drilling and More Nuclear Plants May Be Ill-Advised

Panic over rising energy costs is something we can’t afford.  It would be easy to panic about energy supplies when faced with the 33% gasoline price rise in 16 weeks such as I documented here in the Detroit area.  Panic doesn’t put one in the mood to make sound choices, however.  Now conservatives, some of whom stand to make a lot of money if their advice is followed, are telling everyone that we in the US need to start drilling for oil on our continental shelves (link) and in previously forbidden parts of Alaska, and that more investment in new fission-based nuclear power plants is needed (link).  I believe that, once again, those with profit motives are going to try to play on the fears and desires of average citizens in order to become richer.  Fortunately there are many more who have opposed increased oil drilling and more nuclear power plants (link), and with good reasons. 

In Matters Such as Global Climate Change, Politics and Arguments are Inevitable

Who can you trust?  Reading some of the global warming-related sites, it is easy to see that a majority of articles and arguments are from people with “an ax to grind”.  Some are “warmers” or even “members of the eco-Reich”, while others are “deniers”, and sometimes the political rhetoric and blind conservative hatred for global climate change proponent Al Gore and others are palpable.  Is all this flap and fury necessary?  Where is it coming from?  Must it continue to cloud or color the science involved?

Undocumented Children, Enabled by Technology, May Challenge Nationalism in Coming Decades

One third of the world’s children have no birth certificate or other proof of citizenship.  I was shocked by an NPR interview this morning that made this statement.  Unicef has a lot more specific information on the vast numbers of children without papers, citizenship, or any benefits at all (link)(link).  Someday those children will be adults, probably a quarter or more of the world’s adults, and will represent a lot of power and influence, a lot of potential voters and customers, an army just waiting for a way to organize and some leaders to organize it.  The implications are staggering, and intriguing.

Iraq War Cost Could Have Better Served as Progress Towards Sustainability … but NO-O-O!!

Talk about lost opportunities! Bloggers are having a field day with “What the cost of the Iraq War COULD have been used for …” (link). The BBC and others waded in with articles totaling up the costs and suggesting alternatives that might have been pursued (link) (link) (link). All this is very interesting and sad, but the real costs will go on and on, expressed in missed opportunities and huge tax dollars going to pay the interest on the debt the Bush Whitehouse has loaded on the backs of our descendants.

Technological Development Isn’t the Only Thing Accelerating

Can improvements in technology keep up with increasing global demand? As I look around at various discussions of the current world situation I read lots of interesting thoughts and ideas around our rapidly advancing technology. Some see the rate of technological advancement as being on a continuous exponential upswing that will result in fabulous new classes of products, free or nearly free energy, and answers to practically all of our currently-anticipated global troubles within a decade or two. Others see a rocky road of regional energy and food shortages, promising technologies taking too long too implement, and much worse. I tend to be somewhere in the middle of it all, and working to raise consciousness so that the rocky road will be less so, and the technologies will have time to arrive. The problem is that, while technological development is accelerating, world problems are, too, and population seems to be the perennial behind-the-scenes story. The real race I see is between conservation (to buy time), scientific developments, the will to implement new technologies, and increasing human numbers and per capita demand. The unfortunate fact is that demand is accelerating faster than population as the world “globalizes” and modernizes.

Who Would Have Thought Richard Nixon a Visionary?

In 1960, Richard Nixon gave a speech on the country’s agricultural problems to a group in South Dakota (link) in which he noted that “population here and elsewhere is growing at a remarkable rate.”  He also noted that beef consumption per capita had increased by more than 40% in less than 20 years, from 56 to over 80 pounds per person per year, or about a quarter pound per day, a pattern very similar to what is seen in rapidly developing countries now (for meat, not necessarily beef).  This certainly sounds prophetic as, 48 years later, we watch improving standards of living in the developing countries combining with burgeoning overpopulation to produce a global consumption binge such as the planet has never seen before.